The You

In this collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates considers the alternate destinies we might have had and the other lives we could have lived if we had made different choices. The collection is titled The (Other) You.

An accomplished writer goes back to Yewville, the town of her childhood, and the visit stirs uneasy thoughts about who she might have become had she never left. A man in prison reflects on the weight of an act that cannot be undone. A student has an affair with a professor, and the resulting pregnancy changes the course of her life. Reading itself is also examined as a kind of transformation, a way of stepping into another time, the time of the book.

The stories explore the limits that the circumstances of our birth and our temperaments place on us all, and they look closely at the competing pressures and expectations that women in particular face. They pay close attention to the nuances of our social and psychic selves.